Do This If You Are Already Exhausted By 2026

Am I doing what is right for me now, or am I on cruise control?

What we want at 70 might not be what we wanted at 40. To live with a whole heart, we must face the reality of where we are now.

“The temptation is to stay in a place where we were previously comfortable, making it difficult to move to the frontier that we're actually on now,” Whyte writes in his story for OWN. “People usually only come to this frontier when they have had a terrible loss in their life or they've been fired or some other trauma breaks open their story. Then they can't tell that story any more. But having spent so much time away from what is real, they hit present reality with such impact that they break apart on contact with the true circumstance. So the trick is to catch up with the conversation and stay with it — where am I now?”

Is my golden age being wasted on my old ideas?

Youth is wasted on the young, they say — but our third acts are also wasted if we refuse to learn from the first two.

“Being broken by life is one of the most difficult and transforming aspects of being human,” poet and philosopher Mark Nepo writes in his new book, “The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life.” “Over a lifetime, we are broken and repaired by great love and great suffering until we settle into an illumined ground of being that no one can take away.”

How was I going to illuminate my life from the wreckage of my divorce? Step one: I needed to face the truth.

Am I telling myself the truth? Or performing in someone else’s circus?

Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote her masterpiece, “Gift from the Sea,” in 1955, when she was 49 and in need of enthusiasm. The wife of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh escaped her everyday life and went to Captiva Island in Florida, where she luxuriated in the solitude of the sea and found a story in each seashell.

Her life had been full of trauma. She was an introvert in a public marriage. Her husband was domineering. She lost her oldest son in a highly publicized kidnapping and murder. 

“What a circus act we women perform every day of our lives,” she wrote in “Gift from the Sea.” “Look at us. We run a tightrope daily…”

Lindbergh writes of a revelation similar to Whyte’s: “The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. That is why so much of social life is exhausting; one is wearing a mask. I have shed my mask.”

Do I exhibit the three traits shared by wholehearted people?

It took courage for Lindbergh to come out from her husband’s shadow. Courage is one of three traits author Brené Brown identifies as necessities for a wholehearted life.

In her bestseller “The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are,” she writes: “Wholehearted living is about engaging with our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion and connection to wake up in the morning and think, ‘No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough.’ It’s going to bed at night and thinking, ‘Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth: I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.’”

What makes me come alive?

The answer is your key to wholeheartedness. As Brené Brown says: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

I come alive when I “time travel” through old newspapers and genealogy records, digging for threads of history and weaving the threads together into stories.

That is how I emerged from the graveyard haunting my nightmares. I took on a job I knew would be formidable but also life-enhancing: editing the official history book of Palm Beach County, Florida, where I grew up. Little by little, my research and interviews infused me with enthusiasm.

I cleared the mental quicksand — and steered my way to my new frontier.